Waiting for International Political Sociology: A Field Guide to Living In-Between

This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social at the same time and in equal measure. The power of this in-between approach is that it forces thinkers in IPS to constantly look at the horrors of our contemporary world without turning away. Through the ambivalent position of the “happy wreck,” this paper explores the need to do something about these horrors (e.g., diagnose, act, intervene) while fully acknowledging that such actions always produce new forms of violence and exclusion. To help thinkers in IPS inhabit this challenging space of inquiry more confidently, the paper makes four suggestions: (i) broadening our emotional responses to the horrors of the world; (ii) resisting resolution through non-cathartic dispositions; (iii) pursuing slow research to contest dominant rhetorics of crisis and emergency; and (iv) re-imagining shared conditions of vulnerability.